Abstract

Tinnitus is a very complex symptom that has many subtypes, which all require different treatment methods. The Tinnitus Database collects the data of tinnitus patients in centers all over the world, with the aim of helping doctors in determining the correct subtype of tinnitus the patient suffers and determining the best treatment method. This is done by providing the relevant information, out of the huge amount of data that is stored in the database, to the doctor. The current database is based on MySQL and it has two main problems. First, the application needs many joins to provide the relevant information that is distributed among different tables. This causes a long response time in some cases. The other problem is the data validation that is pretty important in medical processes, as if it is violated the health of people could be affected. For example, there only exist some possible treatment methods, so it should not be possible to assign another treatment method to a patient. Currently, this has to be ensured with additional methods in the application and additional tables in the database. This thesis examines different NoSQL technologies, if they could solve these two problems and what other advantages or disadvantages they have compared to relational databases. The purpose of this thesis is then to find the best fitting database technology for the system.